Wondering if you've had a mystical experience?

Have you had an experience where time stood still, your awareness expanded, and you were filled with joy? A moment so powerful that you couldn’t describe it but you knew it was some kind of spiritual awakening. And twenty years later, you would remember it clear as day as if it were yesterday? If so, you may have had a mystical experience.

I talk to people all the time about mystical experiences and other EHE, and what I’ve discovered is that many people don’t know if they’ve had a mystical experience or not. This blog will help you to know whether you’ve had one, understand more about your experience, and what to do with it. Or, more importantly, how to feel that feeling again.

MY MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE

In that moment, everything changed. It wasn’t just that my perception had become more expansive and lucid, I had changed, I was no longer a thing. I was no thing. And yet I extended far beyond my physical body. I was full of joy and wonder; the world was magical, and I was in awe. It was as if I was seeing the world for the first time. Thoughts, judgments, desires, and aversion all receded, and all that was left was inner peace and a beingness. I was having a mystical experience, though I didn’t know it at the time.

This profound experience of absolute reality, spiritual insights and effortless joy was, for me, my most spiritually significant time in my life. One that will be with me for the rest of my life.

MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE - A COMMON PHENOMENA

Mystical experiences are, in fact, a common human phenomena that have been documented across cultures and religious tradition for millennia. Over the last 40 years one-third of North Americans consistently report to Gallup polls that they have had such an experience. IMERE have collected hundreds of accounts of such experiences. But many people who’ve had a mystical experience would never call it a mystical experience. That’s a term that’s used in psychology research.

ENLIGHTENING AND SPIRITUAL AWAKENING EXPERIENCES

Mystical experience isn’t a term that resonates with everyone. Some people refer to their experience as an awakening experience, enlightening experience, religious or spiritual experience, spiritual awakening, insight experience, peak experience or non-dual experience. Others prefer terms like oneness experience and unity experience. And then some people like to give it no name, for any label would take away from what they experienced.

Many of these labels mean different things to me. Working as a transpersonal practitioner, I sometimes need to be more specific about people's experiences. And the more specific, the more we can understand our experiences. So, if you'd like to know more about the nuances of terms like spiritual awakening, enlightening experience, mystical experiences and awakening experiences, you can get detailed descriptions on my blog about the difference between awakening experiences and mystical experiences.

MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES AND TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY

Spiritual and religious experiences have been a topic of research in theological studies, anthropological studies, philosophical studies, perennial philosophy, psychopharmacology and transpersonal psychology. As you can imagine, people have been having these religious and mystical experiences since time began.

Transpersonal psychology is a branch of psychology that explores spiritual awakening and all that transcends the egoic identity. This includes altered states of consciousness, transpersonal experiences and exceptional human experiences. One of the most well-known, researched, and investigated transpersonal experiences is mystical experiences.

That means that rather than looking at your mystical, spiritual or religious experience as a mental illness where you're somehow thought of as delusional, which is how they have been traditionally viewed by psychologists, they are recognised for their benefits and potentially positive effects.

MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE RESEARCH

William James, one of the most prominent figures in psychology, often referred to as the "Father of American Psychology", was the first psychologist to investigate mystical, religious and spiritual experiences. James gave a series of lectures at the University of Edinburgh between 1901 and 1902 called The Varieties of Religious Experience. In these lectures, James explored the psychological and personal aspects of religious experiences, examining them from a scientific and philosophical perspective. He encouraged his students to study these profound mystical experiences themselves.

Other pioneering writers and researchers found in mystical experience literature are Evelyn Underhill, who wrote the iconic book Mysticism; Walter Stace, who wrote the book Mysticism and Philosophy; Rudolf Otto, and Ralph W. Hood.

WHAT IS A MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE?

William James said that a mystical experience is an experience during which people experience a sense of oneness. He stated that a oneness experience combined with noetic quality and ineffableness is sufficient to establish an altered state of consciousness as mystical.

While James stated these as the prominent features of a mystical experience, he also added that a sense of transiency and passivity can also be present. Walter Stace identified five additional characteristics of mystical experiences; objective reality, positive feelings, sacred and divine nature, paradoxicality and ineffability. Lets take a deeper look;

Oneness

Oneness, also called unity or non-duality is the primary characteristic of mystical experiences but it is not sufficient alone for an experience to be classed as mystical. For example you can have a oneness experience at a football match but it probably isn't a mystical experience. This oneness experience feels like all is one and connected. Like there is no separation between you and the rest of the world.

Noetic / Objective Reality

Noetic or objective reality is the sense that the experience is more real than anything else you've ever experienced. As if this state of pure consciousness is more real than your everyday, cognicentric state of consciousness. And in this state, you have a sort of intuitive understanding, direct knowledge or wisdom. It is as if your vision becomes clear and your perceptual, cognitive filters of expectation, belief and culture are removed and no longer intermediate experience, but the experience is direct and uncluttered with pre-conceived ideas.

Positive Feelings

Mystical experiences always have an element of positive affective states such as pure happiness, love, compassion, gratitude, exhilaration, or ecstasy. Many people feel like they’re at a spiritual height. They feel accepted and nurtured, connected and safe.

Altered Time and Space Perception

Alterations in our time and space perception seem to be a consistent feature of mystical experiences. However, this aspect did not get much attention from early researchers in the field. And, while I experienced some sort of alteration in time and space perception, for me, it wasn’t a defining feature.

I think it gets so much attention in the literature and measurement of mystical experiences because most of the quantitative research on the subject is based on psychedelic mystical experiences. Obviously, psychedelics affect your time and space perception.

Chen et al. (2011) investigating the mystical state in monks brings up an important point. During a mystical experience, time and space become extraneous or unimportant.

Sacred and Divine Nature

Some people describe their experience as sacred and divine in nature. But this religious framework will not resonate with everyone. Before I had a mystical experience I was spiritual and believed in some sort of God or higher power or something that can't be put into words. After my experience, paradoxically, I felt that even more so and at the same time, I felt more atheist than I had ever felt in my life. Which leads me to the next dimension of mystical experiences.

Paradoxical

Paradoxical elements refer to the contradictory or seemingly self-contradictory nature of mystical states, which can challenge conventional understanding and language. For example, I felt very strongly that I was both everything and nothing. Other people report a sense of oneness and separation. In a qualitative study I conducted, one participant who’d had a mystical experience during a Watsu treatment mentioned they felt as if they were the water and yet not even in water.

Ineffable

Quite naturally, then comes the ineffable. The fact that the experience can not be explained by words. That no amount of words could do it justice. We just don't have the language and vocabulary to describe such an experience. And forget trying to explain it to someone who’s never had one.

HOW LONG DO MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES LAST?

Most mystical experiences are sadly over very quickly. They’re fleeting. As quickly as they happened, they disappear, and we’re flung back into our normal state of consciousness, wondering what just happened and how we can have the experience again.

William James suggested that mystical experiences are transient and, the experiencer is passive, having no control. If we did, we’d all revel in the experience for a lot longer. So, for the last 100 years, people have assumed that mystical experiences last only a few moments.

However, more recent research, including my own peer-reviewed and published research suggests otherwise. And some people, including myself, find their mystical experiences last years.

WHAT CAUSES MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES

Drawing on my own research again, 49% of my participants unsurprisingly cited spiritual or religious practices as being a significant trigger of their mystical experience. The participants were able to cite more than one trigger. 29% said that they were in nature, and 28% cited psychological trauma as being a trigger. 18% reported no discernable trigger or other.

Both of my mystical experiences happened in the context of spiritual practices. The first happened during a guided mindfulness meditation while I was on an 8-week Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction course for mature students. And the second happened when I was on a week-long silent retreat with a prominent spiritual teacher.

While these are the common causes of mystical experiences, anything from giving birth to attending a live performance can induce mystical experiences. Another very common trigger for mystical experiences is psychedelics. Now, I'm not talking about tripping at a nightclub. When people on their spiritual path use psychedelics for ritual, spiritual or therapeutic reasons, mystical experiences can happen.

MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES AND PSYCHEDELICS

After I had my first mystical experience, I wanted to understand what had happened to me so I fervently started searching scientific papers to find out. At that time, there were a handful of studies on the subject. But then I hit jackpot. Most of the psychology literature mentioning mystical experiences was coming out of the John Hopkins Centre for Psychedelic Research.

It turns out that the healing effects of psychedelics are positively correlated with the strength of the mystical experience people have during their psychedelic experience. In other words, the stronger the mystical experience the more healing people reported and the more persistent the positive effects were.

Today, there are hundreds of research studies about psychedelics and mystical experiences. And while psychedelic therapy is not all about mystical experiences, they do play a prominent role in the therapeutic model.

MEASURING MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES

Measuring mystical experiences is as challenging as measuring anything else that is subjective. We all have different ideas of what, on a scale of 1- 5, 5 actually means. Added to that is the fact that, by their very nature, mystical experiences are ineffable, and things get a lot more complicated.

Nevertheless, there are several questionnaires that can be used for measuring mystical experiences. I won't go into too much detail here but if you're interested, I discuss the different tools in my blog, measuring mystical experiences.

It's important to remember that mystical experience questionnaires were designed for research purposes and nothing else. However, my participants and clients have reported back to me that completing mystical experience questionnaires has provided them a great opportunity for reflecting on their experience. Most people find it very helpful. But, I must say that some people don't find it useful at all. Like labelling and talking about their experience, doing questionnaires seems to take something away from their experience.

MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES AND TRANSFORMATION

The transformational and therapeutic effects of mystical experiences are well documented. At one point in time, mystical experiences were referred to as quantum change experiences or religious conversion experiences. This is because they hold tremendous potential for transformation.

Nowhere else has this been seen more than in psychedelic research. A significant part of measuring the effectiveness of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is the Persisting Positive Effects scale, which measures the transformation that participants undergo.

But these transformations are not limited to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy mystical experiences. In 2004, William R. Miller published his research on quantum change. He interviewed 55 participants about their positive psychological transformation and categorised them into either a mystical type experience or an insightful type. One thing that stood out for Miller was that something had changed on a most fundamental level of their identity. These experiences don't just change our behaviour and beliefs. They change our identity.

These transformational experiences are why psychedelics are receiving such big headlines. Researchers have had tremendous results with people suffering from previously difficult-to-treat psychological problems such as treatment-resistant depression, existential crisis in terminally ill cancer patients, people suffering from addictions, and anorexia.

My own life-changing transformation was mind-boggling. On the outside, I looked no different, but everything had changed for me. I remember writing in my journal about a year in, "What the bleep just happened to my brain". It was literally rewired. And I wasn’t the only one that noticed I’d changed. Even my doctor noticed there was something different about me.

INTEGRATING MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES

Just as spiritual practice is a major contributor to having a mystical experience, it's also a major contributor to integrating your experience. Research suggests that the more people engage in spiritual practices after their experience, the stronger the persisting positive effects are.

Certainly, reflecting and journaling on your experience can help you to understand it better and learn more from it and that's what integration is all about. Between my own experience and those I've helped, I find reflecting on your experience is the single most powerful tool for integrating your mystical experience into ordinary life. And I don't just mean the actual experience, I mean reflecting on your journey afterwards.

Reading spiritual literature can also be really helpful. Connecting with others can reduce feelings of isolation and help you learn and grow from other people's experiences and journeys, too.

Most people who have mystical experiences, if not all, experience some sort of positive psychological transformation. But we can milk it. We can take this opportunity, this gift and run with it. Transform ourselves for the better through focused integration practices.

Spiritual practices like meditation and breathwork can help us to tap into our spiritual or transpersonal aspects. They help us to experience the stillness and non-duality again and again. Practices like yoga and tai chi help us to get into a flow state, which, I believe, is a precursor to the mystical state. Mindfulness can bring that mystical state into our everyday life.

HONOUR YOUR MYSTICAL OR SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

Not everyone will have a mystical experience in their life. If you are lucky enough to have a mystical experience, see it as a gift and honour it. No doubt it will be the most of one of the most spiritually significant experiences of your life and I believe you have had this experience for a reason. They are powerful experiences, even if they are only momentary. They hold powerful transformational potential. You have been given a gift. What will you do with it?